Posted in Houghton Library on Feb 17th, 2010 Comments Off on Charles Armitage Brown studies Hogarth
Charles Armitage Brown (1787-1842) is perhaps best known for his friendship with the poet John Keats. A skilled amateur artist, Brown is responsible for one of the most recognizable images of his friend. Houghton recently acquired a bound album of Brown’s drawings, produced between 1809 and 1811. The ink drawings include sixty-four heads, studies Brown […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jan 21st, 2010 Comments Off on Bound by Rowntree
Marianne Tidcombe, in her Women Bookbinders, 1880-1920 (1996), explores in detail how the simultaneous growth of educational opportunities for women and the birth of the Arts and Crafts Movement in England at the end of the 19th century resulted in a dramatic increase in women bookbinders. Houghton’s shelves are already graced with the handiwork of […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Oct 21st, 2009 3 Comments »
Selections from a recently-acquired group of 19th century chapbooks (click on the images to enlarge them): The storm at sea, *EC8.A100.820s2 An address to the unfortunate female, *EC8.A100.820a4 A peep into a gin shop!, *EC8.A100.819p To find these and other chapbooks in Houghton’s collection, search HOLLIS for “chapbook” and refine your search by location “Houghton Library”.
Posted in Houghton Library on Sep 22nd, 2009 Comments Off on Ezra Pound reading Galdós
We’ve just received a new addition to our collection of association copies, an 1897 edition of Benito Pérez Galdós’s realist novel, Doña Perfecta, owned and annotated by American intellectual Ezra Pound (1885-1972). Pound probably acquired the work in 1905, and annotated the text with numerous notes and translations. In a letter written to Iris Barry, […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Aug 19th, 2009 Comments Off on Runaway Groom
Modern has recently acquired the Report of the Proceedings in the Cause of Mary Alice Orford, versus Thomas Butler Cole, Esq. for a breach of promise of marriage…, published in 1818 following the trial on March 30th of that year. This sensational case was, according to The Times, “the subject of general conversation throughout the […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Aug 5th, 2009 Comments Off on What should we tell our children about Vietnam?: The Bill McCloud Collection
In 1987, Oklahoma junior high school teacher and Vietnam veteran Bill McCloud wanted to begin teaching his students about the Vietnam War. After conducting a survey to determine what Oklahoma students already knew about the war (and finding that they knew very little, and that little was taught), McCloud began writing letters to a number […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jul 17th, 2009 Comments Off on Winifred Coombe Tennant
Winifred Coombe Tennant (1874-1956) was a Welsh writer, politician, suffragette, and patron of the arts. While her work to promote Welsh art, history, and culture are well known–and is extensively documented in her papers at the National Library of Wales–a group of papers bequeathed by Mrs. Coombe Tennant to the Houghton Library sheds new light […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jun 11th, 2009 4 Comments »
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), novelist, literary theorist, philosopher, and journalist – though a reclusive figure in the literary world – had a profound impact on twentieth-century thinkers such as George Bataille, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, among others. A recent acquisition by the Library, a joint purchase by Modern Books and […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jun 3rd, 2009 2 Comments »
In 1861, President Lincoln signed a bill making the United States Sanitary Commission into a government agency. Organized by thousands of women volunteers across the country, the commission succeeded in raising almost twenty five million dollars during the course of the Civil War, and worked to cut the disease rate of the Union Army in […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Apr 27th, 2009 1 Comment »
At the turn of the twentieth century, Spanish publishers the Maucci brothers commissioned Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) to illustrate a new series of children’s stories on the history of Mexico, the Biblioteca del niño mexicano. Each story was published with a colorful, and often rather gruesome, wrapper illustration depicting the contents within, and […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Mar 26th, 2009 1 Comment »
While best known as a Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) held government posts in the British government of Malta from April 1804 to September 1805. The location was chosen in part to aid the poet’s poor health. From April 1804 to September 1805, Coleridge served in Malta as Secretary to the Governor, Sir Alexander […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Nov 24th, 2008 1 Comment »
The Library’s traditionally strong holdings of texts in English dialects, particularly dialect poetry, have been further enhanced with the acquisition of the James Stevens-Cox Collection of William Barnes of Dorset. Barnes (1801-1886) was one of those remarkable self-educated Victorian polymaths: schoolmaster, clergyman, philologist, artist, and (most importantly) poet. Born into a farming family of seven […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Nov 21st, 2008 3 Comments »
By examining a reader’s annotations in the margins of a book, it can be possible to obtain insight into what might have influenced that reader’s own writing. We recently acquired both a copy of J.W. Mackail’s Latin Literature owned and annotated by T.S. Eliot, as well as Allen Ginsberg’s copy of T.S. Eliot’s Collected […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Oct 16th, 2008 3 Comments »
José García Villa (1908-1997) grew up in Manila, and as a teenager began to receive attention – both positive and negative – for his poetry. He moved to the United States in 1930 and enrolled at the University of New Mexico, where he founded the literary magazine, Clay, and began to write short stories. He […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jul 9th, 2008 Comments Off on Pocket pick
This ballad, titled “The Chapter on Pockets,” focuses on an essential item that many of us probably take for granted – the portable, convenient, and discreet pocket. Crudely printed, rife with spelling errors, and displaying a woodcut of a young woman walking in the countryside, the ballad references such disparate figures as Eve and Lawrence […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jun 13th, 2008 Comments Off on A Kerouac Pun
This broadside, printed with Jack Kerouac’s poem “A Pun for Al Gelpi,” was printed on a handpress here at Harvard by The Lowell-Adams House Printers in 1966. The poem, addressed to Lowell House resident tutor Al Gelpi, refers to a shared joke between Kerouac and Gelpi, explained in this negative print of the poem’s typescript: […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Jun 13th, 2008 Comments Off on Poems by Mary Custis Vezey
This first edition of Mary Custis Vezey’s first collection of poems contains work in Russian and English, as well as translations of Aleksandr Blok and Nikolai Gumilev into English and of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sarah Teasdale, and George Santayana into Russian. Bilingual poet Mary Custis Vezey (sometimes spelled Mariia Vizi, 1904-1994) was born in […]
Posted in Houghton Library on May 20th, 2008 1 Comment »
If your gadgets are on the fritz, or you just feel like technology is taking over your life, let Fuller’s Computing Telegraph take you back to a simpler time of slide rules and mental arithmetic (and don’t worry, the irony of blogging about this isn’t lost on me): This “computer” is one of the earliest […]
Posted in Houghton Library on May 2nd, 2008 Comments Off on Casa Editorial Cenit
Casa Editorial Cenit was a leading independent radical publishing house that operated in Madrid from 1928-1936, a turbulent period in Spanish history. It was founded in an effort to educate the impoverished, disenfranchised masses, and bring democratic values to a new republic. Cenit published works in thematic groups, such as Crítica Social, La Novela de […]
Posted in Houghton Library on Mar 28th, 2008 Comments Off on East meets West
This is the first of four parts of a juvenile geography, titled Di li shü lin væn-koh kwu-kying z-tì yiu-tin kong-tsing, and published in China in 1852. Its author, William Alexander Parsons Martin (1827-1916), was an American Presbyterian minister who lived and worked in China and Japan for almost forty years. The book is block-printed […]
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